The Choices We Make
by ChemicalsandMeat
Summary: Shilo is the youngest of Rotti Largo's four kids. She has a pretty good life, until an overheard conversation leads her to wonder if it was all a lie... ShiloXGraverobber
1. Chapter 1

Title: The Choices We Make

Fandom: Repo! The Genetic Opera

Genre: Drama/ Romance/ Alternate Universe

Rating: Teen (may be subject to change)

Pairing: Shilo/Graverobber

Spoilers: General knowledge of the movie is advised, though this is an AU fic.

Summary: Shilo is the youngest of GeneCo founder Rotti Largo's four kids, and lives a fairly good life. Until she overhears an argument between her father and Blind Mag. Shilo begins to wonder exactly how much of her life is a lie?

Author's Notes: This is an AU fic that has been wriggling around in the back of my brain for a while. Let me know if you would like me to continue. Unbetaed, so all mistakes are mine.

Luigi, Pavi and Amber's ages at Shilo's birth I've set at 22, 17, and 12 respectively for the purpose of this story.

* * *

….17 Years Ago….

_Rotti Largo stared down at the crying infant in the Gentern's arms. Had Marni never fled this child would have been his--__not Nathan Wallace's. He glanced at the police hauling the distraught man way in handcuffs then at the dead body of the woman on the floor. No. This child would be his. Luigi and Pavi were already proving themselves as disappointments and he feared it was already too late to correct the mistakes he'd made with Amber. He took the baby from the Gentern. Yes, he'd raise Shilo as his. _Penance, _ he thought to Marni. _ You left me and forced my hand, but I'll raise her for you. _It was fitting, he decided. _

"_Clean this up," he ordered tersely and left with the infant cradled in his arms, the Gentern hurrying to keep up._

Chapter 1

Shilo turned the page of the book she was reading, not really seeing the words. She felt restless, edgy, and she couldn't seem to put her finger on why. Her siblings had been summoned to their father's office and Shilo had been politely told to wait downstairs. No surprise there. She didn't know what they had done this time to warrant Rotti Largo's ire, and she was quite certain she didn't want to know. It was always something, though, lately--either separately or together. It was the one time she was grateful that they always left her out.

It wasn't that they went out of their way to leave her out--well, Pavi and Luigi anyway--it was just that they were all so much older then her that they had nothing in common. She was closest in age to Amber, and even then it was twelve years apart, but unlike her brothers who mostly just ignored her existence, Amber had made it very clear that Shilo was unwelcome. Amber had tolerated her when she was younger, but as soon as Shilo figured out how to walk and talk--and escape Amber's persistent desire to turn her into a dress-up doll--tolerance had turned to jealousy. Before Shilo, Amber had been the baby of the family, then Shilo had come along and taken away all of Daddy's attention.

Shilo didn't think Amber would ever forgive her for it.

"Shilo?"

Shilo looked up from pretending to read to see Blind Mag making her way across the lobby of GeneCo's headquarters. Shilo abandoned her book immediately and raced to meet the opera singer.

"Mag! What are you doing here so late?"

Mag smiled, giving Shilo a brief hug in greeting. "I could ask you the same thing."

Shilo shrugged. "Waiting for Dad. He's yelling at them again." No need to elaborate on _them_; Mag knew more about her siblings latest scandals then she did, most likely.

"Well, at least you have the sense to stay away from those things," Mag replied.

Shilo snorted, tucking a long strand of straight black hair behind her ear. "It's not like I'd have the opportunity in the first place. I swear Dad get's more paranoid every year. I'm going to have to have and armed escort to the bathroom soon," she grumbled.

Mag's smile turn sympathetic. "I'm sure he means well," she said quietly.

Shilo frowned. That was Mag's trying-not-to-say-something tone of voice. Did Mag know something about the added security that she didn't?

"Mag? What's wrong? Has there been another attempt that…"

"No, nothing like that, Shilo, don't you fret. It's nothing you need to worry about." Mag shook her head, trying to reassure her. The kidnapping attempt two years ago had been mostly forgotten, though Shilo occasional still had nightmares about it.

It was, however, one of those non-conversational topics in the Largo family. There were a lot of those that applied to her, much to Shilo's constant annoyance. She was seventeen, she didn't need to be babied anymore. Still, she knew from experience she wouldn't get anything more from her friend.

She changed the subject. "So what are you doing here?"

Mag's eyes drifted half-closed, her face giving away nothing. It was an enigmatic look Shilo had tried several times to emulate but never came close. "I just need to discuss something with Rotti," she replied.

The elevator doors opened at that moment with a ding, catching their attention. Shilo's brothers stalked out together, paying her no attentionLuigi scowling ahead and Pavi too wrapped up in his own reflection. Amber followed them, pausing to glare at Shilo before moving on. Mag waited until the front door clanged shut behind them before turning back to Shilo. She placed a sympathetic hand on Shilo's shoulder before stepping into the elevator herself.

"Goodnight, Shilo," Mag said.

"Bye Mag!" Shilo returned as the elevator's doors slid closed.

Alone again. She glanced at the GeneCo guards hovering in the shadows and amended that to: Alone-ish. Shilo sighed, flopping back down on one of the many cushy couched that were strewn about the lobby and picking up her book. She hated being bored.

Shilo flicked idly though her book for another five minutes before giving up and carefully sidling over to the elevator. By the time her guards realized what she was doing and tried to follow the doors had already clicked shut in their faces. Shilo grinned, feeling smug as she pressed the button for the top floor. _Hurray for small victories_, she thought as the elevator began to rise.

When she reached the top, Shilo made sure to hit every button before stepping out. No need to make it easy for them to follow her. She was around the corner and halfway down the hall to her father's office before she registered the sound of raised voices. Cautiously she continued forward, trying to make out the garbled words coming through the walls. What could her father and Mag possibly be arguing about?

"…she deserves to know the truth!" Mag's rich soprano was beautiful even in the tones of anger.

"…better…not knowing…" her father's accent heavier under stress.

What was going on? Shilo took a few steps further down the hall.

"Marni wouldn't want…she loved Nathan…" Mag was saying.

Shilo frowned. Marni was her mother's name, but who was Nathan?

"What would…accomplish?" her father replied.

Shilo pressed against the door trying to make out the muffled words. Cold wood against her ear, and the sounds became more clear.

"Shilo was their child…" Mag began.

Shilo froze, shocked.

"Shilo is mine!" her father roared. "You will tell her nothing, or do I need to remind you who you work for?"

"I haven't forgotten," Mag said coldly. "but I am beginning to think it is time for a change. Goodnight, Rotti."

Shilo stumbled away from the door as she heard Mag's footsteps moving in her direction. She scrambled back down the hallway at bit and concealed herself in a shadowy alcove, half hidden my a faux tree. The darkness would probably keep her hidden from anyone but Mag, but there were no other options and she didn't feel like confronting anyone about what she had heard just yet. Luckily, the singer glided past without looking in her direction and turned the corner to wait for the elevator. Shilo slid to the floor, trembling and trying to process what had just happened.

'_Shilo was their child…'_ as in not Rotti Largo's?

Her mother had died when she was born, that's what she'd always been told. It was another one of those non-conversational topics, she'd accepted that; she'd never even been allowed to visit her grave.

'_Too dangerous,_' her father had said firmly.

'_Dead is dead,'_ Amber had sneered.

'_She loved you very much, isn't that enough?'_ Mag had told her gently.

Shilo used to pretend when she was younger that her mother wasn't really dead. That she just had to pretend for some unknown reason--maybe to foil some plot against GeneCo--and that she'd be back someday. The reason she couldn't see the grave and the body was because there wasn't one. Once or twice she's even wondered if Mag was her mother and no could know because it would be a scandal, Marni just a fiction, but never once had it occurred to her that her father wasn't really her father.

'_She loved Nathan,'_

'_She deserves to know the truth'_

What was the truth? Shilo's head was spinning too fast to even get a handle on something. Maybe she'd heard wrong, or didn't understand what she'd heard. The words had been muffled and listening though heavy wooden doors was not the best way to guarantee accuracy.

"Shilo."

Shilo started, looking up from where she'd fixed her eyes on the floor. Mag had returned, Shilo's bodyguards waiting just out of earshot down the hall and looking annoyed, or at least what passed as annoyed, they didn't have much facial expression.

"How much did you hear, Shilo?" Mag asked quietly.

Shilo gave a falsely innocent smile. "hear what?"

Mag smiled faintly. "Shilo…" she paused, as if trying to find the words and failing. She closed her eyes briefly then opened them, her expression bittersweet. "I think perhaps you should visit your mother's grave."

"What?" Shilo began, "Mag, I don't…"

The singer held up her hand to forestall Shilo's words. She brushed Shilo's bangs back affectionately. "She's in a mausoleum in the graveyard on the western end of the city. Perhaps she can give you answers that I cannot." and with that Mag turned and walked away.

Shilo was prevented from following by her father exiting the office. He smiled warmly when he saw her.

"I though you were waiting downstairs," He said walking over to her.

"I saw Mag go up, I figured you were done yelling," Shilo said carefully, trying to give nothing away.

Rotti's face darkened briefly. "I am glad that at least one of my children isn't determined to embarrass me," he said, tucking her under one arm as they headed towards the elevator. It was a familiar embrace and Shilo was having trouble reconciling it with the overheard argument and Mag's cryptic advice.

"I don't think they're doing to purposely embarrass you. I just think they act without thinking sometimes," Shilo said absently. She didn't really understand her siblings' motivations either sometimes.

Siblings? Were they even that? If not, did they know? More questions piled up in her head.

"Maybe," Rotti replied blandly. "Let's go home."

Shilo nodded distractedly. Home, father, siblings, mother--how much of her life was simply a fabrication. People had been not-saying things around her for her entire life, it was time to find out why.


	2. Chapter 2

Title: The Choices We Make

Fandom: Repo! The Genetic Opera

Genre: Drama/ Romance/ Alternate Universe

Rating: Teen (may be subject to change)

Pairing: Shilo/Graverobber

Spoilers: General knowledge of the movie is advised, though this is an AU fic.

Summary: Shilo is the youngest of GeneCo founder Rotti Largo's four kids, and lives a fairly good life. Until she overhears an argument between her father and Blind Mag. Shilo begins to wonder exactly how much of her life is a lie?

* * *

Chapter 2:

Shilo had years of practice at ditching her guards. Unlike Amber, who just let them trail along wherever she went, when Shilo went AWOL, she did it properly. It wasn't difficult to slip out of the Largo mansion, Amber and Luigi were in the foyer arguing about something and Pavi was--well Shilo didn't really want to know where Pavi was. Her personal bodyguards were elsewhere since Rotti considered the general security of the mansion enough, and it took Shilo no time at all to slip past her distracted family and out into the night.

Shilo knew the general layout of the city pretty well, though she rarely had the chance to explore it, and she found the graveyard in question with only a little trouble. Once inside, however, she realized that it was not going to be as easy as she'd first hoped. There were thousands of graves spread out across the acreage and at least a hundred different mausoleums. Finding her mother's would be the needle in the proverbial haystack.

"Couldn't have been a bit more specific Mag?" she grumbled under her breath as she started forward.

She kept her senses alert and muscles tensed to run at the slightest hint of danger. She knew that the cemeteries were patrolled at night and it wouldn't do to be mistaken as a grave robber. She crept along quietly, the smell of dust, decay and grave moss heavy in the air as she walked. She tried not to think too hard about exactly why she was here as she peered at the names on the mausoleums. She supposed she might have felt different if she'd been dissatisfied with her life, perhaps then discovering that her family wasn't really her family would have been some sort of a relief or vindication, but she'd liked her life just fine. True she wasn't really close with her siblings, but with the exception of Amber she got along with them alright, and though her father was often busy he'd always found time for her. The fact that it all might be just a fabrication had been eating away at her since the overhead conversation the previous night.

The soft sound of boots scuffing across the ground had Shilo ducking quickly behind a near-by gravestone. Cautiously she looked around the headstone, expecting the see the matte-black, flashlight wielding silhouette of one of the GeneCops. What she saw instead was a man with long, multi-colored hair and a glowing blue syringe. He was watching her with an amused expression.

Graverobber had been watching the girl out of the corner of his eye for several minutes before she'd noticed him. He recognized her of course; everyone knew the faces of the Largo family even if Shilo had never been in the media spotlight like the others. Well, not since Rotti had announced the adoption anyway, but that had been years ago. What he was curious about was why she was creeping alone though a graveyard. She peered out around the gravestone, clearly expecting one of the security guards.

"You lost, kid?" He asked, filling another Zydrate vial. He could talk and work at the same time.

She stood up but did not come closer. "Who are you?" She countered his question with her own.

"Graverobber," he replied, moving to the left and surveying a likely looking tomb.

She frowned. "I meant your name," she clarified.

He smirked, sliding the heavy stone slab to the side. "So did I. What are you doing here, kid?" It wasn't exactly safe to creep around cemeteries at night, especially for a sheltered rich-girl.

She looked away momentarily, wrapping her arms around herself. She turned back to him. "I'm looking for something." She gave him an appraising look.

Graverobber ignored it. "Good luck then," he said dismissively, sinking his syringe into the nasal cavity of the corpse in front of him.

She bit her lip, he could see her out of the corner of his eye, and took a few cautious steps forward. "You know these cemeteries pretty well right?"

He made a noncommittal noise, curious to see where she was going with this.

"I want to find my mother's grave," she said after a long hesitation.

He looked up at her then. Had she begun to suspect her past wasn't what she'd been told? He knew well from Amber's long rambling complaints that the girl had been kept ignorant of her origins. Apparently something had tipped her off. Interesting, but not really his problem.

"Can you help me?" She asked bluntly when he didn't respond to her indirect statement.

"I could," he responded, filling another vial with the glowing blue liquid. "But I don't really see what's in it for me." He almost smiled at the cute little frown she gave him.

"I could pay you later, I guess, I don't really have any money on my now," she said dubiously.

He snorted. Later, yeah right.

She narrowed her eyes. "I can!" she protested, a hint of irritation in her voice as she followed him to the next corpse.

"I'm sure you could, kid, doesn't mean you will," he replied.

He cocked his head, studying her. She really was a tiny little slip of a thing wasn't she? She shouldn't be wandering around alone, but the stubborn glint in her eyes said she wasn't about to leave without finding what she came for. He gave a mental sigh.

"Tell you what, I'll help when I've finished my own business," he replied, calmly sliding his syringe into another body.

He could see her watching him with a sort of horrified fascination. "I've never understood how you can pull Zydrate out of the dead like that." She crouched down next to him and Graverobber heaved another mental sigh; she was way too trusting.

"Most drugs are just chemicals, and when bodies die they set off all sorts of chemical reactions. Really, the corpses are just incubators," he explained.

She tilted her head to the side, thinking on his words. "Huh, that makes sense. I never thought about it that way."

"We're all just meat and chemicals," he'd read that somewhere once, not that he'd remember where, but it was fitting.

"That's depressing," she said with the cute frown again.

"That's life, kid."

"My name is Shilo, not kid," she grumbled.

Graverobber ignored it. He found a few more corpses that had not already been picked over, the girl calmly following him to each one.

"You shouldn't be so trusting," he said finally.

She shrugged, unconcerned. "I figure if you'd wanted to hurt me you'd have done it by now."

He looked at her stuck halfway between amusement and exasperation. "You don't get out much do you?"

Her eyes narrowed again. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Graverobber just rolled up his tools, satisfied by his take for the night. "C'mon kid, I'll take you where you want to go."

She blinked at him. "I haven't even told you her name."

Graverobber smirked. "Like you said, I know where all the bones are buried." He still got a sort of perverse pleasure at being able to say that and mean it literally.

He lead her though he sprawling cemetery with obvious familiarity, avoiding the places they were likely to run into any patrols. "Why sneak out in the middle of the night to find a grave?" He asked, more out of the bored desire for conversation then anything else, he was already pretty sure he knew the answer.

"I'm looking for answers," she responded quietly.

"And you think you'll find them in a grave? The dead don't have many answers."

She shrugged. "I don't know, I'm not finding them anywhere else."

Graverobber halted in front of a non-descript, slate-grey mausoleum, gesturing at the doorway with an exaggerated flourish. "Your answers await."

She squared her shoulders and ducked inside, the heavy door banging as it shut behind her. Graverobber debated on whether or not he should just split now, thought about her all tiny and too-trusting making her way home alone, and settled in to wait. Besides, he was kind of curious as to how this would play out.

Shilo paused, letting her eyes adjust to the darker interior of the mausoleum. There was a portrait on the far wall, and Shilo recognized her straight away. This was her mother's tomb. She studied the picture, not quite ready to look anywhere else yet. Everyone said she resembled her mother, but she'd had a hard time seeing the elegant woman from Mag's pictures in her own scrawny frame. Finally, drawing up her courage, Shilo looked down at the stone slab.

Marni Wallace

2011-2040

Wallace. Was that just her mother's maiden name? Or was it the last name of the mysterious Nathan? Shilo bit her lip in frustration, she didn't know what she'd hoped to find in here, but all there was, was more questions. She knelt down and traced the carved letters wondering about the woman who had given birth to her. Growing up without a mother hadn't seemed strange to her, after all her siblings had as well, but for the first time she wondered what it would have been like her around.

Shilo glanced behind her at the closed entranced to the mausoleum. Graverobber, he'd had no trouble finding this place without even a name to go by. That could only mean he knew something, perhaps even what she was looking for. He was right; the dead rarely had answers--but the living were another story. Standing up, Shilo took one last look at the stranger who had carried her and stepped back out into the graveyard.

She was half-surprised to find Graverobber still waiting for her outside, perched comfortably on a headstone. He looked amused, as if he already knew she didn't find what she'd hoped to.

"What do you know about me?" Shilo asked him. She'd already figured out that direct was best way to go with him, otherwise he'd talk her in circles.

"Shilo Largo, likes to go wandering in cemeteries in the middle of the night to pester honest, hardworking folk," he replied with a smirk.

"I'd hardly call you honest, " she snorted. "Grave robbing is illegal."

"You going to turn me in?" He asked, not looking the least bit worried.

"I just want some answers about who I am," she said. "I know you know more then you're saying."

He looked at her carefully for a moment, as if trying to decide something. "I might know something," he said eventually. "The question is if you're sure you want to hear what I have to say."

"I have to know," Shilo said firmly. She knew she probably wouldn't like it, but she was tired of people keeping secrets from her.

He shrugged. "Alright, here's what I know: about seventeen years ago, Rotti Largo was dating the current resident of the mausoleum behind you. He even announced his plans to marry her. The media was all a buzz about it." Graverobber shook his head. "Then she broke off the engagement. Rumors were rampant about why, but as near as I can work out she'd fallen in love with one of the surgeons that worked for GeneCo, a man by the name of Nathan Wallace."

Shilo swallowed. So Wallace had been Nathan's name.

"They married shortly there after," Graverobber continued. "A child on the way, they fell out of the media gossip pages for a while. Until she got sick, a blood disease they said it was. Nathan searched desperately for a cure, terrified of losing his wife and unborn child. He thought he had found the cure, but he was wrong. She died, and the child was delivered a month early. Nathan Wallace was arrested for manslaughter and Rotti announced that he was going to adopt the orphan. You."

Shilo wrapped her arms tightly around herself, trying to process what she's just heard. "How could I have not known if it was in all the papers?" she whispered.

Graverobber shrugged. "He decided it would be better, developmentally I suppose, if you were to grow up with out the stigma of you birth always in your mind. The media respected that, he's the people's hero after all." He watched her closely. "You okay, kid?"

Shilo gave a strained laugh, "not really."

She was about to say more when she was blinded by a searchlight. Sirens began to wail all around her, as the sound of running feet came towards them.

"Grave robbers on premises! We have grave robbers on the premises!"

Shilo felt someone grab her hand. "This way, kid," and she let Graverobber lead her deeper into the cemetery at a dead run.

* * *

AN: major props to anyone who knows where the "meat and chemicals" line was from, and my penname.


End file.
